This is the Baymau Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Sprint Billings. Welcome to the end of session 3. Today we have our usual capstone conversation,

concluding our journey through the Gospels and reviewing the story from Genesis all the way through John.

That's right. Make sure you listen to this. Be treasures and goodies in this episode. I don't know if people are listening to the capstones. They need to.

It's required. Seriously, it's so good to like step back every once in a while and just reorient ourselves with the full perspective of what God is doing in the scriptures.

You better believe it. Yeah, I'm totally with you there. Before we dive into the review, just one quick passing comment. I realized like as I was thinking back in the last few episodes,

you're kind of racing to the end of session 3 here. I was so anxious to keep moving. You know, right at the very end, we talked about, I think in our last episode titled The Mountain,

we chatted about discipleship and kind of in passing, I made these big grandiose claims to end our last episode.

Like what is discipleship and what is discipleship not? And, you know, I'm really working off of a Jewish rabbinic understanding of what discipleship is.

The discipleship is following a rabbi. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It's just all or nothing commitment to following a rabbi.

We're not doing that kind of discipleship anymore in the church today in our world. And I have a passionate conviction that it would work.

That's what I'm trying to say. Here's what I'm not trying to say. And we're going to talk a lot more about this. That wasn't the end of that conversation. That was the beginning.

We're going to talk more about this in session 4. We're going to come back at the end of session 5 and the end of our study altogether. We're going to look at this. But,

I'm not trying to say that all the things that we call discipleship in the church don't matter or we shouldn't be doing them.

Like the church often will talk about what I would call church assimilation as discipleship. Like getting involved in the church,

like discipling people is getting people connected and then getting people serving and then getting people like leading.

And that's all good. But that's really just a church assimilation strategy. I think we should be doing that.

Like helping people get connected to churches and find faith communities. That's really valuable.

So I'm not saying stop doing that. It's not my point. It's not like we have not advocated for the benefits of being in a community.

Absolutely. And so, and just because I don't call it discipleship, I am not on some mission to get the church to quit using that word.

I could care less. I mean one thing when I say discipleship, I realize that 95% of the world, Christian world in America,

is not going to mean that thing. That's okay. That's not my point. My point is do we understand what Jesus is kind of discipleship was?

And are we pursuing that on some level? Church assimilation is great. We call discipleship spiritual formation.

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